Bad guys used latest crime tool, a car, to flee brazen heist in 1915
On the evening of Nov. 20, 1915, four masked gunmen barged into the Sloat Cafe, a dance hall in San Francisco’s sparsely settled hinterlands at Sloat Avenue and the Great Highway. After robbing the bartender, they marched him onto the dance floor, forced the patrons and musicians to line up and relieved them of their cash and jewelry.
They told the band, “On with the dance and don’t stop for 15 minutes!” Then they made their escape in an unusual fashion. They sped off in a car.
It was the start of a series of brazen armed robberies and killings that terrorized the city for the next month, and marked one of the first times San Francisco police were forced to contend with a powerful new crime tool: the automobile.
In 1915, cars were just becoming popular in American cities. Henry Ford had begun mass-producing his revolutionary Model T in 1908, but only about 500,000 had been built by 1915. That same year, San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition offered the first public demonstration of Ford’s assembly line.
The new motorcars led to a jitney craze in cities across the country. In San Francisco, a fleet of 600 jitneys began carrying passengers from the Ferry Building to the Castro district for 5 cents. But few people drove cars.
The San Francisco Police Department was no exception. Police mostly still worked their neighborhood beats on foot. As Kevin Mullen notes in “The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories From Old San Francisco,” the force’s horse-drawn patrol wagons were not replaced by automobiles until 1912. Two years later, each police district was equipped with a Ford sedan, but they were used only to respond to crimes, not to patrol.
The gang that hit the Sloat Cafe took advantage of this technology lag to rob businesses in remote neighborhoods. Two days after their heist by the beach, these early adopter criminals robbed a saloon in Sacramento. Two days after that, they returned to San Francisco.
At 1:40 a.m. on Nov. 24, they drove in a stolen car up to another remote roadhouse, the Claremont Cafe at 36th Avenue and Fulton Street. Four men with their faces covered with handkerchiefs, each one holding a revolver, held up one of the proprietors, emptied the cash register, then robbed the halfdozen customers. The only woman present managed to hide her jewels in her mouth.
When the bandits were distracted by the arrival of a new group of revelers, one of the entertainers managed to call the Richmond District Police Station. The gang ran out, jumped into their car and sped east on Fulton. Four police officers piled into the station’s Ford and gave chase, joined by a motorcycle cop named Charles Dullea, who would later become chief of police.
As the gang raced down Fulton, the pursuing police fired at their car, trying to shoot out its tires. Two of the bandits, who were hunkered down in the car’s open rear, returned fire. The getaway driver careened left on Sixth Avenue and sped north past the police station and Lake Street, crashing into the Presidio wall. As Mullen notes, “Throughout, the bandits displayed a singular lack of familiarity with the layout of the streets in the Richmond District.”
Two members of the gang climbed over the wall and into the Presidio. The other two opened fire on the approaching officers, hitting Cpl. Frederick Cook in the abdomen. The officers returned fire, striking one of the bandits, Harry Wilson, twice in the chest. The other three outlaws disappeared into the trees and escaped. Both Wilson and Cook died of their wounds.
As evidence of how unusual it was for anyone to know how to drive, both the police and the proprietors of the Claremont told the press that they believed the suspects were “ex-chauffeurs.” The headline of The Chronicle’s Page One story touted a sensational development: “Police give chase in an automobile.”
The “jitney bandits,” as the press called them, then headed for Seattle, where they robbed a gambler and held up a drugstore. In a shootout that followed the drugstore robbery, another police officer was killed.
On Dec. 20, the gang struck in San Francisco again, robbing a grocery store at 21st Avenue and Geary. On Dec. 23, they held up a saloon at Seventh Avenue and Hugo Street, where the brother of one of the proprietors, 18-year-old Henry Doelger, fired at them as they drove away. (Doelger later became famous as the developer of inexpensive homes in the Sunset and Westlake districts.)
Later that night, the bandits swung over to the Tenderloin and robbed the aptly named High Gear saloon at Ellis and Leavenworth streets.
The band’s reign of terror was not over. The next night, Christmas Eve, they robbed a house at 2385 Howard St., killing an “aged man” named James Schade, then attacked the Niagara saloon at 789 Howard. Patrons again opened fire on the bandits as they drove off, hitting one of them in the shoulder. (A remarkable number of the bandits’ victims seem to have been armed.)
This incident proved the undoing of the jitney gang. The wounded outlaw, 23-year-old Howard Dunnigan, and the rest of the gang fled to Los Angeles and laid low. But Dunnigan’s wound didn’t heal, and in January he checked himself into a hospital, telling the doctor that he had been shot during a quarrel with a woman in Tijuana.
The doctor didn’t buy his tale and called the police. Dunnigan and two cronies were arrested and he was sent to San Francisco to be grilled by police.
Dunnigan turned out to be the scion of an old and respected Maryland family. During his imprisonment, several society women visited him, one of whom asked to have him released into her custody so she could “make a man out of him.”
Under interrogation, he broke down and revealed the details of the crime spree, blaming other members of the gang for the murders. Two of his confederates were sentenced to life in prison.
Dunnigan’s blue blood and his cooperation with authorities apparently was a get-out-of-jail-free card, because he was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter and, incredibly, sentenced to just seven years’ probation. According to Katey Gilbert, a San Francisco parole attorney whose clients are mostly serving life sentences, today a member of a gang that carried out numerous armed robberies resulting in the murders of three people would get a minimum sentence of 25 years to life for each killing.
The jitney gang case led San Francisco police to organize the first motorized anti-crime patrols, “shotgun squads” of detectives who drove around looking for trouble. Later, uniformed auto patrols were established. The days when mechanized road warriors could rob roadhouses in desolate parts of the city with little fear of being caught were over.